An Incident
I recall a time during the previous semester when I was sitting in a lecture on Lipids given by A/P Swami. For most parts of the class, I thought I was merely imbibing a specific set of information about the workings of the cell membrane ("a lipid bilayer with transmembrane proteins")... until we reached slide 15:
And then it dawned on me - quite suddenly - that down to even a cellular level, we are constantly communicating! With respect to the fifth function, "Cell-to-cell communication", I became aware of the existence of the very elegant, and elaborate mechanisms that takes place inside (and between) every single cell. For me, communicating effectively represents more than what occurs on the visible realm, or the present platform - it represents an almost fundamental desire to reach out to another human being, (or another cell, if I were a cell).
We see the importance of this in the resulting consequence of a breakdown in communication. A signal molecule, wrongly encoded, could switch off an important tumour-suppressor gene and could, alongside a myriad of factors, cause a cell to metastasize. Likewise, a sentence, poorly worded or encoded, could possibly turn people off and this may end up in no small email war. I'm sure those with any experience in a bureaucracy and have had the ignominy of being caught in an email tirade, in the endless cc loop of misconstrued messages, can empathize. It is not pleasant to be misunderstood. And it may not always be easy to clear up problems arising from such misunderstandings. Hence, possessing effective communication skills serves to avoid this predicament in the first instance, or at least minimizes the potential for misunderstandings. God knows how much I dislike being misinterpreted, and how much I am wont to misinterpret others myself.
In Sum
With time, I've learnt that although one cannot control how one's message will be perceived by others, one can take the necessary steps to equip oneself with the tools of good communication practices. One can take the steps to ensure that that the message is received and aligned, as close as possible, to the intention of the sender. I imagine that such a tool would be like a sword - sharp, incisive, blunt when needed, but always cutting across the dreadful dragons of legalese, jargon-filled talk AND striking at the very heart of the matter.
That is all (or at least, the gist). Thanks for reading. I'm only beginning on this course of a lifelong journey in learning how to communicate well, so please forgive any weaknesses (in presentation, expression of ideas etc) in the above. I appreciate that we are all on this journey together :)
Peace,
Dave
Hey Dave,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post. The analogy you use is perfect to sum up the whole situation, although some might not appreciate it because of all the jargon. Anyway, I totally agree with your point of view that we can and must make an effort to reduce the errors while transmitting a message. I have encountered cases where messages were sent across wrongly because I made too many assumptions.
See you in class later.
Haha. Dave, it is fun reading your post - Relating it to life science that we learnt in class. I guess Science students would love it. My friends and I always try to relate our lives to some science theories. For instance, I was just telling my friend this afternoon that the tuition centre I work in squeezed all my classes on Saturday; schedule is so “tight” just like heterochromatin. LOLx.
ReplyDeleteBut this sort of communication will not work on others who don’t know much about life sciences and they may appear confused (just like my heterochromatin joke).
Haha~I've got some confused by Klara's joke,but I got what you mean by relating communication to cell membrane.(actually I'm quite poor at biology:p )
ReplyDeleteI think we all used to involve something we familiar,like our major,into our communication.In fact,there is an Chinese saying,one cannot leave his major within three sentences:)
hello fellow life science student!
ReplyDeletenow that you bring it up in your post, cell communication is indeed like normal communication between people! didn't really thought from that perspective before, so it was quite interesting for me.
but maybe you could use less scientific terms/big words? ( eg. metastasize-> I had to take some time to recall what it meant)otherwise, people who has studied biology before will be able to understand and related to your post.
*ps: actually, your post looks relatively longer than most of our classmates, maybe you would like to look into that? thank you :)*
@zoey: which Chinese saying is that? (in chinese) I'm curious :D let me know in class or something...
Hi all!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your responses! I enjoyed reading what you had to say with regard to what I had to say about communication (and the cell).
Actually, I did deliberate whether I should use the word "metastasize", but I came to the conclusion that it was an apt word to describe what would happen if communication in the cell and in the corporate environment went awry. I do apologise, however, if the the parallel I was trying to draw seemed too intimidating. On a side note, I figured that parts of the word will yield clues about it's meaning - meta" and "size" hinted at an increase in amoun, a growth in size when I first encountered it :)
As for the length of this piece, the last two paragraphs were just me half-apologising/half-justifying the use of the cell as an analogy for the resulting consequences of poor communication practices. I would have added another paragraph rationalising the number of words used if it did not, err.. already increase the total word count :p It did cross my mind to relegate some phrases (or a sentence of two) to a footnote but I wasn't able to figure out how to accomplish this in blogger. Do pardon me.
On the day (by the end of this course perhaps!) I figure out how to tighten my prose the way heterochromatin compacts the whole of itself into a minute bundle, inside a minute cell, I will rejoice. (It's a fascinating process, really. When straightened out, the chromatin apparently runs the perimeter of a tennis court!)
Thanks Klara (with a K) for that wonderful image :)
Thanks Zoey for bringing to our attention this apt proverb:
"one cannot leave his major within three sentences" Whoa.
Thanks Ning and Hui Xin for your kind words and feedback.
Keep em' coming!
Best,
Dave
This is a compelling post, Dave. Like the other readers, I appreciate your use of the analogy from biology, and your statement about how we are communicating at deeper levels than many people realize is certainly true and insightful. You move beyond the molecular to the sentence level, and mention the potential pitfalls there. Then you wrap up the post by highlighting the value of developing/refining comm skills. The only criticism I have is that while you speak in generalities you don't bring the discussion down to your own specific needs. This is a bit nit-picking on my part, and I suppose one can infer all sorts of needs from what you've written. But a statement about how you now find yourself requiring further development of a particular skill would have made this an exemplary post.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, thank you for your effort!